


These Are The Days It Never Rains But It Pours

by athena_crikey



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: AU, Aged-Up Characters, Autopsies, Case Fic, Drama, Lust at First Sight, M/M, Police Procedural, detective!gon, h/c, pathologist!hisoka, stupidly attractive
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:34:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27500854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athena_crikey/pseuds/athena_crikey
Summary: In Gon’s eyes he looks like some rare hothouse plant suddenly transposed into a common nursery. There’s an elegance to the way in which he holds himself, a confidence that comes not from training but instinct. That self-assuredness sparks an answering ease in Gon; it’s something he understands.“Guess you’re Dr Morow,” says Gon.
Relationships: Gon Freecs/Hisoka
Comments: 20
Kudos: 77





	1. Pet Detective

The dead office air smells like instant coffee and dirty socks. It has since Gon made detective, despite the fact that the Captain drinks only 8-dollar Americanos and has never once been seen without polished shoes or a crisp crease in her pants. She’s the kind of officer who no uniform would dare let down, not even after a 36 hour shift – half woman, half bulldog. 

And right now, the bulldog has latched onto him. “… you listening, Freecss?”

Gon blinks as Captain Krueger puts her hand down on the file detailing yesterday’s car chase. 

“Sure, Captain.”

“If you were listening, you wouldn’t be smiling. This is the second cruiser you’ve wrecked since you made detective. One more and I’m busting you back to beat cop.”

“The perp didn’t get away, though,” he points out in a helpful tone. She looks up from under her blonde fringe icily.

“I would have preferred that he _had_ , rather than you risking your life and the safety of others. This isn’t the Wild West, Freecss. A detective is supposed to show judgement. Tact. Discipline. Not T-bone drug dealers into telephone poles.”

Gon rubs his shoe idly on the back of his pants, face falling slightly. “He did have 15 keys of coke on him, Captain.”

“Is that what you’re worth?”

He opens his mouth, sees the glint in her eye, and closes it again, choosing instead to smile hopefully. She sighs, grabs the file, and tosses it into a tray. There are several more under it; she picks out one and pushes it towards him. He takes it, opening it and flipping through the pages. A homicide. He perks up. 

“Don’t get too excited. You’re secondary on the file. I want you to observe the autopsy and coordinate the report from the pathologist.”

“That’s rookie stuff,” he protests, looking up from the bloody SOC pictures. 

“And when you prove you can behave yourself like a big boy, you can play with them. Until then, consider yourself Zoldyck’s gopher.” She ignores his pleading look. “Now get yourself down to the morgue; autopsy starts at 9:30.”

Gon looks at the clock above her head. It’s 9:15. The morgue is five blocks away; with his car in the shop and cruisers off limits, he’ll have to run. He sandwiches the file shut and runs out, dropping it on his desk and grabbing his coat on his way through the bull pen.

  
***

The morgue is in the bottom of Our Lady of Mercy, an old turn-of-the-century hospital in an area of town that’s primarily brownstone and redbrick, the sidewalks narrow and the roads uneven. The houses have worn steps and window boxes with colourful flowers; Gon can smell their delicate fragrance as he races down the street dodging past pedestrians. Doctors seem to delight in being late to meetings, but in his experience they take it badly when on the receiving end.

He flies up the sandstone stairs at the front of the hospital taking them three at once, slamming through the doors and jogging down the hall to the stairwell. Although the more prosperous areas of medicine like oncology and radiology have had significant upgrades, the basement remains mostly untouched since a mid-century renovation that painted the hallways an ugly mint green and did the floors in a matching speckled olive lino. The stairwell doors are wooden with wired-glass windows; they remind him of old horror movies. 

The morgue itself is all tile and steel, the room long and cavernous and filled with echoes. Every footstep, every tap of an instrument against a gurney explodes into the silence. Thus, when Gon bursts through the double-steel doors and into the autopsy chamber the sound is like a pistol going off. 

The pathologist’s assistant, a short rotund man with a perfect bald spot named Roger (Gon has no idea what his last name is, or if he even has one), is busy laying out the tools on the gleaming polished tray beside the sheet-covered gurney. He’s taking particular care to lay everything out perfectly, each implement spotless and shiny under the bright light array designed to cast out shadows from corpses’ dark bulging interiors. The walls are a blank white; there’s a counter that runs beneath the narrow windows at the far end of the room that’s made of the same black epoxy resin as Gon’s high school lab tables were. He’s never seen the cabinets under it opened. The windows show the ankles of the passersby aboveground, and rarely let in much light. 

“Dr Herman in a mood?” asks Gon, leaning back on his heels and catching his breath. He’s hot from his run but he knows he’ll be cold soon; although the corpses are kept in separate refrigerated bays, the autopsy room itself is also always chill. 

“No clue – he’s gone to Palm Springs. We’ve got a new guy in. Dr Morow.” The assistant’s tone is not enthusiastic. 

“Oh, a stickler huh?” He knows what that’s like. Captain Kreuger doesn’t let anything slide, not sloppy paperwork and not poor fieldwork. Or crashed cruisers, for that matter. 

“He’s a strange one. He’s got this way of smiling when you make a mistake – like he’s imagining all the ways he could cut you up into pieces. And his eyes… You don’t forget ‘em.” He shakes his head and finishes stocking the tray. “I’ll go get him, if you’re ready.”

He makes it sound like he’s about to introduce the Police Commissioner to read the riot act, not some stand-in pathologist. Gon shrugs. “Sure.”

Roger gives him a pitying look and crosses to the door. 

Gon takes the opportunity to look under the sheet that covers the bodily remains of Edward Brigg, J.D. The blood that soaked his skin has been washed away and the little of it that’s left in his body has sunk low to his back, leaving his exposed front a pale porcelain colour. The cuts in the skin are thin, nearly invisible in the flabby flesh. His eyes are sunken and shadowed, his mouth just slightly open to display too-white teeth. Lawyers can afford a good dentist. 

“Mm, peeking? How naughty.”

Gon turns, surprised. He didn’t hear the door open. 

Standing just inside the steel door is a tall, well-built man dressed in the usual green cover-all gown and white surgical gloves. His skin is almost as pale as the corpse’s, his thick combed-back hair a lush colour between red and pink and his eyebrows thin and expressive. He’s wearing thin rectangular wire-framed glasses; behind them his eyes are an impossible gold. 

In Gon’s eyes he looks like some rare hothouse plant suddenly transposed into a common nursery. There’s an elegance to the way in which he holds himself, a confidence that comes not from training but instinct. That self-assuredness sparks an answering ease in Gon; it’s something he understands. 

“Guess you’re Dr Morow,” says Gon, while Roger slips into the room behind the pathologist. 

“Guilty as charged.” Morow’s voice is purring, sensuous. It slips over Gon’s skin like satin, an intimate caress. He blinks. Morow smiles, amused, coy. “And you are, by the looks of you, my pet detective. Jeans and a leather jacket; it’s a mystery to me why you all spend so much sweat and blood to climb out of your uniforms only to adopt a new one.” His eyes drift down Gon’s body, gaze sharp behind his thin glasses. 

“Pet?” says Gon, more confused than irritated, meeting his eyes when they rise again without looking away. He has the sense that the doctor likes what he sees, and why not? He’s young and fit and good-looking; he knows all these things without being vane about them. At first glance Morow is a little… much, but even after only a few seconds Gon’s finding himself warming to the pathologist, to his handsome features and his pretty hands.

“Your Captain phoned me. Apparently you’ve been assigned to carry the fruits of my labour back to your colleagues. She was very clear that you’re entirely at my disposal.” His grin curls in anticipation. “Gon, was it?”

“Gon Freecss. Glad to meet you. I really only need the results of the autopsy, though.”

Morow pads towards him, his footsteps soft despite the tile floor which dips shallowly into the mouth of a drain beneath the autopsy table. His eyes follow Gon as he walks by, the gold foil-bright in the instant he passes and they’re unobscured by his glasses. He comes to a stop in front of the sheeted cadaver, hands resting on the edge of the gurney. 

“Let’s not be too hasty,” he says, folding back the cloth to the dead man’s waist. The dead skin seems almost to absorb the light, draining it away. The shadows beneath his chin and sides are blue like a snow-scape; cold, lifeless. Morow turns to Gon, tilting his head slightly to motion him forward. Gon joins him beside the steel autopsy table. Morow reaches out a long-fingered hand and points as he speaks. “Here and here – stab wounds. Here – significant blunt-force trauma head wound. And here,” he picks up a hand and taps the nailbed. “Signs of hypoxia. Suffocation. I have rarely met a man who has been killed three times over.”

Gon frowns, looking at the body. “But the autopsy will reveal what killed him, won’t it?”

Morow cocks his head to the side, almost playfully. “It might. But then again, it might not. We’re after an answer that will stand up in court, not my best guess. Certainty requires thoroughness. The hypoxia particularly interests me.” 

“Why?”

“Because there are no signs of strangulation, and no mottling on the face to suggest suffocation by a pillow or other object.”

“What does that mean?” 

Morow turns to glance at him, eyes curved with pleasure. His lips are generous, full, the colour of unblemished rosebuds, and Gon watches them form a smile while inside his chest he feels a flush of heat. “There are any number of poisons that can cause oxygen deprivation. If someone wanted our guest here dead enough to stab him _and_ bash him on the head, why not throw poison into the mix as well?”

Gon sighs. “Sounds complicated.”

Morow’s eyes are dancing as he watches Gon, his anticipation strangely contagious. “Mm. But what a wonderful puzzle it will be for us.”

  
***

The pathologist dons a clear plastic face shield for the autopsy and Gon, standing out of the splatter zone, accepts a mask. Morow opens the body effortlessly, assisted by Roger; his cuts are perfectly controlled and of precisely the correct length and depth to peel the skin back from the cadaver’s chest. Then begins the protracted, messy business of cutting the ribs. The long-handled clippers have enough leverage to allow even a relatively weak individual to split bone, but Morow’s grip is strong and his cuts rapid and decisive.

Gon watches as he carefully investigates the path of the stab wounds to the chest, one straight into the liver, and another that just pierced the left lung, measuring the angle and the depth of the wounds and then cutting away the surrounding muscle and tissue to investigate blood saturation. He touches the wet tissue lightly but with aplomb, unconcerned by the damp red marks that appear on his fingers. Gon knows the sensation of touching dead flesh, knows the way it raises goosebumps on his skin. But Morow is a pathologist, used to dealing with corpses. 

“Interesting,” he says, voice rich in the cold room. “Brigg was still bleeding when these cuts were made, although the dark tone of the flesh suggests limited oxygenation.”

“So the stabs killed him?”

Morow glances over at him, his eyes catching the light like sunset on calm water. He’s really very ornamental, even when he’s up to his elbows in gaping red innards. And the way he smiles at Gon tells the detective that he knows it.

Gon likes that confidence. 

“They certainly contributed to his death. Until I open up the cranium I won’t know for sure.” He motions Roger in to take the liver that he elegantly slices out of the thoracic cavity. Gon watches silently as the various organs are weighed and recorded by Roger while Morow carefully examines the hollowed-out body, empty as a scooped-out melon, the flesh sagging inwards. 

He finds nothing of further interest there, and turns to the skull. This he examines carefully, measuring the bruised flesh first with his fingers, then with a metal ruler. When he’s done he glances at his assistant and Roger fetches the saw to open the skull. Gon stands back as the skin is resected, then the saw cuts its perfect circle around the crown of Brigg’s head. The skull top comes off like a coffee lid, revealing the glistening grey brain matter beneath. 

Morow smiles down at it like a proud father at his child, his gaze warm. “Well, well. What big bruises you have,” he murmurs. 

“What do you mean?”

Morow turns the head so that Gon can see the back and slides a slick finger over a grey strip of brain that’s a darker colour than the surrounding matter. “Cerebral hemorrhage. Bleeding on the brain. Caused, in this case, by trauma to the skull. Given that this is just the external bruising and the internal is probably more severe, I would say _significant_ trauma to the skull.” He swivels and taps the removed bone segment over a crack like a spider web, the uneven fault lines dyed red. 

“So the head wound killed him?” asks Gon, confused.

“What a one-track mind you have. Unfortunately for you, I can’t give a definitive answer. He bled out from both the head wound and the stab wounds; either of them could have killed him. I _think_ the head wound came first, but that’s merely speculation. Any judge would dismiss it as specious.”

“It would make him easier to stab if he were brained first,” comments Gon.

“Certainly. However, we still have the hypoxia to contend with. And that will require blood tests. But based on visual evidence, I think it’s likely he wasn’t in much state to fight back when the physical attacks came. Let’s see if we can confirm that.” His voice is nearly sing-song, his comportment showing no signs of being weighed down by the gravity of death. He slips down to stand beside the body’s arms and slowly, carefully begins examining the flesh of the biceps and the inside of the elbows and forearms. He tries first the left arm, then the right. Finally: “Ahah.” He taps a tiny blue mark on the forearm, no bigger than a pin-prick.

Exactly the same size as a pin-prick, in fact. 

Gon nods slowly. “Injection?”

“Likely.” He checks the right elbow, then between the fingers and the backs of the knees a little more rapidly. “No sign here of regular injections, and nothing else has been consistent with drug use – the blood tests will confirm that, too. But probably, someone gave him a jab. And then, when he was incapacitated they finished him off.”

“They?”

Morow lifts his bloody gloves and steps back from the corpse. “You think one person bashed him over the head with a pipe – or similar cylindrical object – and then dropped that and knifed him?”

“When you put it like that…” He raises the collar on his coat to lie against his neck, the cold beginning to seep into his bones. They’ve been here for more than an hour in the chill. It doesn’t go unnoticed by the pathologist. 

“Roger, take care of closing this up.” Morow peels off his gloves and tosses them into a garbage can. Gon’s surprised to see that his nails are well-manicured and painted a deep shade of purple, like he had dug his fingers into an over-ripe plum. His hands, as Gon had seen even in the gloves, are lovely; long and sensitive. “Detective, this way.”

Confused, Gon follows him out of the room and into the hall. They pause while Morow steps into a dressing room and changes, stripping off his layers of scrubs and gown. When he comes out, Gon can’t help but stare. 

In the loose surgical dress it had been clear that he was fit, but with it gone Gon can see he’s broad-shouldered and strong-chested but very narrow-waisted. He’s wearing a sharply-cut grey pants and waistcoat, his shirt pink with a white collar that lies open against his throat. The clothes look expensive; the man looks eccentric, but extremely attractive. 

As if he can read Gon’s thoughts he smiles, pulling Gon down the hall with a tilt of his head. There’s an office labelled Dr Grant Herman; he opens the wooden door and steps in. It’s a small, windowless room with high filing cabinets against the wall and an old computer on the long scarred desk. There’s no spare chairs, just a sagging black faux-leather one behind the desk. 

“My keep and castle,” says Morow dryly. He throws himself into the chair and props his feet up on the desk; his shoes are new and polished. “Now. Tell me a little about yourself.”

Gon shifts, uncertain. He _wants_ to stay, but right now he has work to do. “Uh… I really should be getting back to the precinct so I can update Killua – my primary.”

Morow looks up at him through his narrow glasses, his eyes glinting. “Nonsense, detective. If we’re going to be working together, I simply _must_ know more about you. No time like the present – you never know when you might end up on my slab. Such a dangerous profession you’re in.” He smiles, and Gon reads danger there, like a fox about to gobble up a field mouse in one bite. 

He smiles back; he’s never once backed down from danger. He leans his hip up against the desk and crosses his arms loosely over his chest. “What d’you want to know?”


	2. Smells Like Pretention

There’s an aged brass radiator standing against the back wall of the small office, clinking and humming to itself as it coughs out heat reluctantly. Heat which must be rolling over Morow’s back before it finally crosses the desk to reach Gon’s icy hands. 

Morow shows no sign of discomfort though, his posture relaxed, his eyes amused. “What do I want to know?” he muses, raising his face to the ceiling as if seeking heavenly input. His dark lashes – almost artificially dark, Gon thinks – flutter. Rather than appearing flustered he looks sedate and seductive, the long pale column of his neck drawn in sharp relief against the cool green office walls. He drops just his eyes, chin still raised, and catches Gon’s gaze. Wolfish; wicked. Gon’s easy-going smile deepens. “I’m not naïve, Detective; I’m perfectly aware that being assigned to morgue duty is a gopher’s job. I was expecting a blunderer, a fool. But you don’t strike me that way.” His voice is rich, rolling, lazy as a long summer’s eve. 

Gon shifts his weight on the corner of the desk. “Is that a question?” 

The pathologist’s smile tightens. “What, I wonder, did you do to earn your captain’s wrath?”

Gon shrugs. “That’s easy. I rammed a squad car into a sportscar right beside Symphony Hall.”

“On purpose, I take it.”

“Sure. The guy inside has been selling coke to half of Cambridge. When I flashed my lights he ran; I followed. It ended in a Lexus sandwich. That’s not procedure, if you’re wondering.” 

“Then why…?”

“He delivers to the university market. My partner’s got a kid sister there; some of the kids on the fringe of her group buy from this dealer’s flunkies. I wanted to turn off the taps.”

Morow drops his head and brings his hands together over his flat stomach, tracing over the smooth surface of a purple nail with his thumb. “Mm, permanently, from the sounds of it.”

“Nah; I was only going 40, and I hit the passenger side.”

“Vehicular trauma kills,” says the pathologist mildly. Gon tilts his head to the side. 

“Why do I have the sense that you’re not too bothered?”

“See – much too quick on the uptake to be a gopher.” Morow smiles. “My interest is in death, not life. In nine out of ten cases, it’s more convenient to me for bodies to end up on my slab as soon as possible. There they’re reductable, understandable.”

“And in the tenth case?” asks Gon. 

Morow’s eyes curve in an almost hedonistic pleasure. “There are always a few people who are too fascinating to hurry into an early grave.” His heavy-lidded look suggests he’s sizing Gon up to see which category he fits into. If he makes a decision, he gives no sign of it. “Tell me a bit about yourself.”

“About me?”

“Yes. I’ve just admitted I find it easier to make sense of the dead than the living. Won’t you be kind to me?” His voice is playful, toying. 

Gon shrugs. “Not much to tell. I grew up in Mission Hill; Dad left after I was born and Mom died young. My aunt worked three jobs to keep us going. I almost ended up in juvi a couple of times, but this detective named Kite took me under his wing, got me into a youth basketball program and kept me in school. I became a cop because of him.”

“And now you chase drug dealers and attend autopsies. Truly the American dream,” murmurs Morow. 

“It’s better than prison, or gang-banging,” says Gon easily. “That’s where most of the kids I went to school with ended up.” That or begging on the streets for enough change to land a fix. 

“A childhood like yours goes a little way towards explaining how a car crash seemed like the best option to catch your quarry.”

Gon smiles. “I don’t think it has anything to do with it. I was born reckless, that’s all. I leap before looking, always. But I’m pretty good at getting out of trouble too. If I wasn’t, guess I’d probably be dead by now.” He runs a hand through his hair. 

Morow leans back, chair creaking, and catches his hands behind his head. His biceps bulge in the tight cotton of his shirt, his shoulders corded, powerful. Gon wonders who would win in an arm-wrestle, or more interestingly, seeking dominance in bed. He bets Morow would be heavy but slow, exploiting his weight and trying to pin his partner to the mattress. His thighs are thick, too, and for a moment Gon imagines them straddling him, their hot press against his hips, the – 

His line of thought is cut off by a buzz from his pocket. He fishes out his phone; it’s Killua. “Hey,” he says, mouthing _sorry_ to the pathologist.

“Where the hell are you? It’s been two hours. Did you get mugged at a doughnut stand?”

“I’m still at the hospital.”

“Is the autopsy done?”

“Yeah, but –”

“Then get your ass back here.”

“It’s a little complicated, Killua. Looks like probably some kind of poison was involved. Doc’s waiting on blood tests.”

“Do you have cause of death?”

Gon glances at Morow. “Yeah. Either the head wound or the stabs would have killed him.”

“Fine. Get the details on the weapons and get back here A-S-A-fucking-P.” The call drops, and Gon returns his phone to his pocket smiling sheepishly. “Looks like I need to be going. Do you have the details on the weapons used in the attack?”

Morow sits up, sliding his feet off the desk and onto the linoleum floor. His amusement fades, replaced by a kind of stark professionalism. “The knife was long and thin, like a butterfly knife. Blade at least five and one quarter inches by half an inch, no serration or curve. The blunt object was cylindrical and metal without any raised surfaces, probably a pipe, approximately two and half inches in diameter.” He recites the information from memory. 

Gon nods. “Time of death?”

“He’s been dead nearly 24 hours. Between 10 and 11 yesterday morning.” And then: “Not going to write it down, Detective? I won’t be sending you my official report for a few days, and I don’t repeat myself.”

“I’ll remember,” says Gon. 

“I like confidence,” says the pathologist, resting his chin on his hands and looking up at Gon above the line of his glasses. It’s surprisingly sexy; Gon swallows. Morow’s eyes glint. “Don’t disappoint me.”

“Can I reach you at the usual number?”

Morow regards him for an instant, unmoving. Then, slowly, he reaches out and takes up a pen. He picks up a sticky note from a stack of them and writes a number on it. He hands it across to Gon, his fingers brushing against Gon’s. His skin is hot and dry; Gon’s attention focuses fully on the touch, the silken smoothness of it. His heart stumbles into a quicker pace. “That will find me, any time. So long for now, Detective.”

“Call me Gon,” says Gon, tongue suddenly clumsy.

“So long then, Gon,” purrs Morow. Gon likes the way it sounds in his cloying voice. Like a promise.

  
***

“Hail the conquering hero,” proclaims Killua dryly when Gon walks into the bull pen, jacket over his shoulder and a Stop and Shop premade sandwich in his hand. “Crusher of cruisers and nemesis of Lexuses.”

“It was just one Lexus,” says Gon, tossing his sandwich onto his desk and dropping his jacket over the back of his chair. It sags unevenly, the springs shot. 

“And the captain and I will never let you forget it,” says Killua, smiling smugly from where he’s lounging at his own desk, facing Gon’s. “Now give – what did you get out of the pathologist?”

Gon recites the information Dr Morow provided, which Killua types into the file. “Obviously a premeditated hit, but not with any money in it or they would have brought real firepower,” concludes Killua. He’s dressed in jeans and a dress shirt; unlike Gon’s thrift-store jeans his are designer, and the shirt probably cost upwards of $200. He always looks good, in a playboy-gone-bad kind of way. Gon, by contrast, simply looks rough-edged. He’s fine with that; he _is_ rough-edged. He’s never bothered to try pretending otherwise, probably because he’s always been perfectly happy in his own skin. 

“I still need to read the file,” he confesses. “The captain dropped it on me right before I had to book it to the morgue. 

“It’s nothing new. Edward Brigg was a sleaze defense lawyer one step above a public defendant. He took a ton of cases and didn’t work very hard on any of them, as far as I can tell. He’s a one-man shop, just him and his assistant who doesn’t seem inconsolable that he’s kicked the bucket. He dealt mainly in small-time stuff: minor violence charges, theft, B&E. Since he’s not a public defender he’s got a bit of cachet among the losers too dumb to know he’s fleecing them. He’s not affiliated with any of the big gangs, but he does some work with the small-time ones. Anyway, yesterday he didn’t show up to the office. He didn’t have any meetings or court dates in his calendar, and by the end of the day when his assistant couldn’t get a hold of him she called us. He was found dead in his condo by uniforms at 6:30. No signs of a struggle, but plenty of blood.”

“The doc said he’d been given some kind of shot that reduced the oxygen in his body. That would’ve made him slow, dopey, right?”

Killua taps his fingers against his arm. “That’s weird. The rest of it reads like a pissed-off client. But using a drug like that’s too smart. Or at least, too sophisticated. Can we track it down?”

“We need the blood test results to come back before we know what was actually used. Right now, it’s just Dr Morow’s best guess.”

Killua’s eyebrows arch upwards. “You got a pathologist to give you a best guess? You’re really pulling out all the stops to get out of the captain’s bad books.”

Gon’s mind slips back to the pathologist’s office, to Morow’s rosebud lips curved in a seductive smile and the tightness of his biceps in the thin fabric of his shirt. Desire stirs low in his stomach, heating his throat, his cheeks. “Yeah,” he agrees softly. 

“‘Yeah?’” replies Killua. “That’s it? What’s your secret?”

“He was pretty open with me. He’s… unusual. Not at all what I was expecting, but Doc Herman is on holiday or something and this guy… he told me what I wanted to know,” finishes Gon, awkwardly.

“Is he legit? If he’s some incompetent trainee they’ve brought in to cover for Herman –”

Gon shakes his head firmly. “Nuh-uh. He’s good. Real good.” He remembers the quick, confident moves of Morow’s knife. He hadn’t wasted a drop of blood in removing the organs or examining the internal tissue. And he had never once hesitated. “He’s just kind of strange. Nice! But strange.”

“Well he does cut up dead bodies for a living,” allows Killua. “’Course he’s not gonna be _normal_. Do you trust him?”

Gon wets his lips, uncomfortably aware of his physical reaction to Morow. But he’s never been let down by someone he believed in. “Yeah,” he says, nodding. “I do.”

  
***

Killua and Gon take a look at the crime scene, then split up. Gon’s left to interview Brigg’s building neighbours, while Killua takes the lawyer’s assistant down to the station and gets the details of his life, cases and clients. It’s a long afternoon; door knocking is always taxing and rarely rewarding. And at the end of it there’s nothing but information filing to look forward to.

The two detectives end the day back at their desks entering the information they garnered into the system. Killua’s developed a list of people to interview tomorrow; Gon’s developed jack all. By the time shift finishes Gon’s ready to beat his head against the desk, bored with the very thought of more data entry. 

“I need a drink,” he says, as the room begins to pick up with the current shift packing up and pulling on jackets, and the night shift arriving with coffees in hand. 

“We’re not going out to one of your dives. I never got that stain out after last time,” replies Killua, frowning across at him.

“I don’t want to go somewhere fancy.”

“I don’t do _fancy_.”

“Killua, your places practically smell like pretention.”

“Oh?” Killua stands, pulling on his Hugo Boss jacket. “What does pretention smell like?”

Gon’s nose wrinkles. “Like Grey Goose and Clive Christian.”

“Better than Bud Light and Axe.” 

“Hey, you’re insulting the culture of my people there.” Gon logs off his computer and grabs his own jacket, pulling it on. “I’ll split the difference and go somewhere new, okay?”

“There’s a bar down by the Greenway that just opened last week.”

Gon nods. “Cool.” And then, pausing. “You’re driving.”

  
***

The bar is fronted by a large blue neon sign in cursive that reads, simply, Nell’s. Inside the floor is black jet, the ceiling speckled with small halogen pot-lights and the bar lit by under-shelf LEDs that slowly change colour through a pastel rainbow. There are black and red leather booths on the left-hand side, and chrome and leather stools in front of the bar. The bar itself is a long steel slab inset with the usual sinks, tap-heads and drains.

The patrons are milling around, some standing, others sitting. They’re expensively dressed and well-made-up, the drinks in their hands elaborate and small in serving size. Gon’s familiar with the concept of fancy bars and eateries: you pay more and get less. 

“Smells like pretention,” says Gon under his breath to Killua as they make their way up to the bar. Killua rolls his eyes. 

They order – craft beer for Gon, who really just wants a Pilsner but can see from the tap-heads that it’s not on offer – and a sidecar for Killua, who smells a bit like pretention himself. 

There’s house music thrumming through hidden speakers, the low baseline finding a home deep in Gon’s bones as they make their way through the crowd to a table. 

They’ve just sat down, Gon wondering how many drinks it will take before he can convince Killua to go somewhere a little seedier, or maybe just ditch the bar scene and grab dinner, when a light hand touches his shoulder. 

He swivels, seeing Killua straighten across the table, and turns to look up. He meets wheat-gold eyes and stares. 

“What a coincidence,” says Dr Morow, a drink in his hand and a sly smile on his face. “Just the man I was thinking about.”


End file.
